The Art of Breathing Water
by tarte
Summary: There is an art to making promises and telling lies; it's not the words themselves, so much, as the way they should be said, whispered into the curve of a neck in darkness or laughed over a glass of champagne. There is an art to belief, and it comes to you naturally. This may in fact be why you find it hard to believe in anything.


0. AN: I most likely should be working on Darkened Stars. However, this struck me instead, so here, have a 3 a.m. 3k drabble.

Loosely Magnus Bane meta; immortals intrigue me. Less plot and more 'you are eight hundred years old, you have been scarred and hurt and likely screaming and I want to know how you remain with the grace you supposedly do'. Mostly - near completely - my own interpretation of a character we don't actually get much history of, so don't expect canon accuracy, though I include as much as I can. No, I have not read the Bane Chronicles, yes, I am well aware that whatever I write as background for him will probably be completely overrun by them. No, I do not expect to be satisfied by any answer they could provide, merely because I want too much. Ah, well.

There are a few brief, subtle mentions; one to The Infernal Devices, one to City of Glass, and one to thoughts of suicide, so please, if such a thing would make you uncomfortable you may want to skip this. You may also want to skip this if hardcore grammar is your thing, because a) it's three in the morning, b) this was written without being structured first and c) remains unedited, and d) I myself excel in the Art of the Semicolon, Art in this case meaning anything goes to make the words flow the way I want them too.

With which I conclude; Here, please review, I do not own the Mortal Instruments and do believe you know that, and enjoy, darlings.

* * *

**The Art of Breathing Water**

* * *

1. You'll wake up early one morning and you won't be able to go back to sleep. You'll try to close your eyes and drift off again, blur the thoughts starting to awaken in your mind and subdue the restlessness that is ever running across your skin and in your veins, but it will be futile, and truthfully, you won't try very hard; you can never guarantee yourself peaceful slumber. So you'll give in and get up and you'll hesitate for a minute. You'll pause at the edge of your bed with your eyes unfocused out the window, hands stilled on the sheets. You'll stand. Turn around. Then you'll look in a mirror. You'll stare at yourself for a long minute or so. You'll study your face and touch your cheek and look back into the reflection of your eyes and you'll _know_, you'll know you aren't getting older.

You won't know how long this has been the case; your years won't have begun to blend together yet, but you won't know for exactly how many of them you've been frozen already. You will wonder. But you will avert your eyes and fall back on your bed and close them, and try to sleep again. It is a mere minor question.

You will have more.

* * *

2. It won't be the first time you realize that you're _off_, though; you already know. You first noticed that something is different, something is wrong, when you were just a tiny child but were beginning to realize when you looked up at your mother that she didn't love you. You wondered why she wouldn't hold you, why she wouldn't kiss you, why she would never meet your eyes. You wondered why your father abandoned her, why her family abandoned her, why she abandoned herself. The last time you saw her you were seeking shelter from a storm and you were idly humming some song that she would sing to others but never to you and you walked into the barn to escape from the rain and you saw her hanging and you looked into her glazed, lifeless eyes that looked back at you without actually seeing you.

You know why she abandoned you.

When she is long in the past you will forget her name, the sound of her voice, every word she ever spoke, the song she sang and you did too, the color of the eyes that never looked at you. But you will remember some things; her silhouette hanging from the rafters, the screams of your stepfather when he found her there, how much she hated you and made you hate yourself.

* * *

3. Focus, darling. Breathe.

* * *

4. You were never happy, there in your birthplace. Your first language rolled off your tongue easily but left a sour taste in your mouth. Maybe if you had been born differently, born like the rest of them, you would have lived happily there. But that is not how your story plays out.

When they both are dead, you will blame yourself for both of them. You will curl on the ground, still soaking wet, and shiver and shake and say nothing. This will be soon now.

Then you will stand and cast off that guilt along with all the other remnants of this part of your life. You have felt the urge to run away many times before; the first appearances of the restlessness that you will soon grow familiar with. So you will. There will be nothing left for you. You will have neither reason to stay, nor any desire too, where all you get are stares of fear and contempt. The urge to run away, to disappear, will crawl through you and make your blood rush and make your heart ache as much as it does every time somebody turns away from you.

There will be another urge, too. One to not run away, but walk. Walk away slowly, as the village burns to ashes behind you. You will discard this one, with a little fear at yourself.

But you will be certain that you are capable of carrying it out.

So you will run. It will be the first time, but it will not be the last.

* * *

5. Sparks fly at your touch. Literally. When you first discovered this you examined your hands in awe by the delicate moonlight, before glancing around quickly to make sure that no one had seen - even so young you knew to be careful. Your castle of secrets has its foundation built already, before you even know what you are. As it is, you won't know, for awhile; you won't know exactly what name can be given to your kind, what you are, for years to come. But you will know you are different, finally consciously confirming this thought beyond doubt that seemingly innocent night when you study yourself in a mirror. Take as many years as you wish or you don't wish, for years will begin to pile up and you will slip through them. You will never know the full extent of what you are capable of; sometimes you will be wary of finding out, other times you will revel, for happiness or anger, in seeing just how much you can tear the world at your wish.

The answer will prove, as far as you will test, to be; a lot.

It will be a highlight. Almost always, that is. You will whisper the word to yourself, not because it feels foreign, but the opposite; because it has so naturally become a part of you, it has always been a part of you, you are made of it. _Magic_. It will take no time at all to become accustomed to it, but you will always marvel at it a little. It will be one piece of your puzzle that is strangely shaped but fits perfectly; one that will stand out even in the wildly different colors of your life, that glitters, and spreads a sparkle to all other aspects. You will feel it in your core and in your flesh and in the air around you. It will thrum through you and it will tingle in your fingers long after you feel you have nothing more to give.

You will create sparks and toss around pure streaks of power in delight. Blue fire will light up your eyes. You will also invent, applying your skills intricately to intricate machinery. You will use your power to shape your own craft, characterized by a smile and flames burning at the tips of your fingers. You will warm yourself with it the best you can.

Sometimes, you will let it take you over. Sometimes you will go numb and it will be one of the only things you will still feel; sometimes you will consume it desperately to feel alive again, and sometimes it will consume you. You will not talk about this brand of freedom.

You will consider it to be your blessing, and your addiction, and you will become it and you are it.

* * *

6. You will walk with a unique sort of grace, always, no matter how weary you feel. You're pretty now -You'll be beautiful, and you'll know it. You will break hearts. At first those particular actions will be accidental, unintended; then you will learn by accident too, how best to kiss and touch and promise and lie. Before long, though, you will realize the influence you can hold over people; that you have a different kind of power besides magic. That with a glance you can accelerate heartbeats while your own remains steady. You'll use your beauty as a weapon and your charisma as a tool. You will make people love you, and you will make them fall in love with you, or at least, in your opinion, believe themselves to be in love with you. You will find these people amusing. You will find them sad. You will pity them and be inexplicably jealous of them. Sometimes, you will love them back.

See, you will love. However, despite considering yourself a natural expert of love and desire and how it plays out, you will not fully realize that you, yourself, are as capable as love as any other. You will love rarely; but you have enough time, so much time, to still love over and over again. And so your own heart will break, over and over. It will be one of the pains you find harder to steel yourself to; but you will grit your teeth and hold the fragments of your heart together. Decades of love, or some semblance of it, will reap under your feet. Cities will be strewn with souls pining after you. There is an art to making promises and telling lies; it's not the words themselves, so much, as the way they should be said, whispered into the curve of a neck in darkness or laughed over a glass of champagne. There is an art to _belief_, and it comes to you naturally.

This may in fact be why you find it hard to believe in anything.

* * *

7. There will be others. Along with some of them, a different kind of love, that comes less easily to you but feels more _real_. There will be others like you. Lonely souls, cursed or gifted or christened with long, long life. You will often meet them in offhand, careless, reflective locations that only people like you would go to, people who have time to go wherever they please and needn't worry if they're _going_ anywhere in life. People with all the time in the world. Most of them quickly lose their curiosity of just how long that is.

Friendships will form, as will enemies, and friend or foe you will like them and dislike them and love them and hate them and be grateful for them in a way you cannot truly express. They're easier, and harder, to fall in love with; while you do have brief affairs with some, brief being in both your vocabularies a relative amount of time, it simply never so much as crosses your mind to make the promise of forever to anyone.

If they die, you will miss them, and you will envy them, and you will hope that they are okay but you will not be so sure. Here comes about a contrast. With loves, you will find yourself standing under windows and stars picturing their faces sometimes, but sooner or later you will forget their names; you will give flowers to the living and then bring them flowers when they are dead. You will stand over graves and fire and swear to yourself that it will never happen again; when it does, you will swear it is different. This is one of the many lies you will tell yourself. It is one of the only you will ever truly believe.

With these friends, equally immortal as you, you will not visit them when they are dead. You will let them pass on and you will leave them in peace and even if you were inclined to, you wouldn't pray for them. You will dismiss their deaths quickly, and dismiss the humans who gape at you for this, for they couldn't empathize. This is because of a certain viewpoint it seems immortals seem to develop; humanity is a whole, an almost sweeping current. Lovers stand out, because they are beautiful to the one staring at the sea, but ultimately they rejoin the tide. Immortals are different - they stand out too, and no one knows why, but none of you know what happens to you when you die. Some are simply beyond caring.

There won't just be immortals, who you'll find yourself drawn to. You will find that you are particularly drawn to broken things, broken souls. Maybe this is because no matter how terrible you feel or how little you feel at all you'll never break, not you, even if you passionately, entirely want to. There will be humans – a luxury word you'll refuse to use for yourself, though when drunk you'll occasionally permit yourself to wish it fit you – who you'll let in a little, will talk with, will teach and will learn from. These people especially, these wild, lost souls, you will remember, and carry the memories of.

But they will not stay. They cannot. The immortals will, even if they wish they did not. But you are mainly all solitary by nature and usually choose to stay apart; together there's too much melancholy, maybe. Sometimes someone will show up at your door in the midst of night, crying; you will let them in and hold them and you will understand.

You may meet once a year, or once a century, as time passes so differently in your shared kaleidoscope perspective. You will come together to remember, and to try to forget or to try not to, and you will respect them all, more than you think you are even capable of respecting anyone else. You will pass one advice, to the younger ones, like how losing the first person you love is always the hardest.

You will come to wonder if this is true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe it grows harder every time, or maybe it is always the same, or maybe it is always a different kind of pain and can't actually be compared. As the conversation continues on around you, you will try to remember the first time you loved somebody. You will be unable to recall a name. But you will remember how it felt.

You will excuse yourself. No one will try to stop you. They will understand.

* * *

8. You will grow. And you won't. You will run and you won't. You will hope to live and you will hope to die, brushing close to death enough to not want to go out of this world yet, but never feeling enough in this world to thoroughly want to stay either. You will love and hope to love and you will hate and hope to hate and you will be a mess. You will know this. You will think that there is nothing to be done for it. You will be wrecked over your wreckage anyways.

It will be too much at times. You will go from numb to passionate and from crushed to ecstatic. Again and again you will feel like you don't have the strength or life left in you to ever feel again but you will, you will. You will crumble against back city walls and you will unfold under the purest skies, and you will always be the same person yet never the same from a moment before.

When you feel you are overcome, and you will, you will shout at the universe for answers. You will cry and whisper and scream and demand why. You will hope for answer, from the stars, but no answer will come. The sky will swallow your cry and the sea will swallow your tears and the cities will swallow your humanity and none will give it back. It won't matter, because you will never run out, and may they all shine brighter for it.

When you feel too much or too little, you sometimes try to end it after all. Never seriously, and you've never been fond of any kind of pain, but still there are marks you find yourself carrying for some expanse of time before you simply magic them away. You will not remember every one of them, but you will remember why.

You are powerful. You will know this. You _are _power, and you will have a hand in shaping the very definition of that word. History is the same; you will shape it without recognition that you won't want anyways, and you will become history, rich with stories, a character in the tales of others, entwined with the past and the foundation of the future. But despite being a breathing testimony to history, you will do all you can to escape yours.

You will live like this.

* * *

9. It may seem bleak. It isn't though, really. When you do look back - and you'll try not to, but sometimes it can't be helped - you won't be exactly satisfied but you will not wish to change a thing. Eventually, you will accept it the best you can, and start living your life, on the edges, watching, and learning.

One day, though, you'll be really pulled in, and you won't fight it.

Hold on, darling. Just a little longer. I know you can't breathe right now, you're being held hard underwater, but – it will not be the last time you can't breathe, and it will not be the last time you have to and will anyways.

Much like heartbreak, you know.

* * *

10. There is one last chapter I have for you – I do not know what happens after this. But I don't despair for you, you know. Your story may have a happily ever after after all.

You'll meet someone. After everything you've gone through, centuries at this point, you'll dismiss it at the time. Of course, you'll acknowledge that he's pretty – gorgeous, actually – and slip him your phone number, but honestly - You won't be actually expecting it to go anywhere. You'll want him to call, you'll be _intrigued_ by him, but oh, you'll not expect how deeply you'll fall in love with him.

You may have been in love before. You may never know for sure. This will simply be the first time you ever admit that you are in love.

And he will be different too. Not like you, not like anything he's supposed to be even in his own society, he'll just be himself. And this time, it will be different, different than any love you've experienced before, and unbelievably _new_. This time you will flash him your signature smile and he won't smile back, but color will splash on his cheeks and you'll smile even wider; another day, you'll smile at him again, and the smile you'll get in return will be so radiant you will stand truly stunned for a moment. From then on, when you smile at him and with him it will be truly _true_, and it will reach your eyes, and the looks he gives you in return will reach your heart. Ah, and he's the first to actually make your heart skip a beat; and still, to him, your heartbeat will be the steadiest thing in his life.

He will not change you. He will not want to. He will just bring out the best in you. With him, you will be truly happy. For the first time – and you will know it is the first time, for once – you will be _okay_ with dying, because you can't imagine a better way to die than with him, and you can't imagine a better way to spend your time than with him, and you will share secrets and you will share laughter. You will not make promises, because together you will come to terms that they can't be assuredly kept, not out of malice but because sometimes that is simply the way the world works. You, who had thought you'd seen almost everything, will realize this from him – that that is impossible. For the first time, you will see immortality as a _joy, _because it gives you forever to truly change. It is also the first time when you begin to contemplate giving it up. To be with him. A sacrifice, sure, but all you will have to do it meet his eyes and know there is nowhere else you could ever be after this. You will love him, he will love you, you will love each other.

But see, you won't tell him any of this, any of your stories. His trust in you won't fade, but his trust in himself will. Then, your trust in him will shatter. You will leave him. You will break each other.

* * *

11.

You have a life ahead of you.

A long one, too. An immortal one, one that you will love and hate and at one point, cherish. You will rip the world apart at the seams sometimes, and tear yourself with it; other times, you will build and create something majestic, and anonymously have a hand in shaping history. Mostly, though, you'll stay on the fringes of this society, throwing decadent celebrations but retreating in yourself, navigating with a graceful arch of your back and curve of your mouth and eyes that shine as bright as the stars that have shown above you for centuries.

And sometimes, things will change, and you will change with them without ever changing at all.

See, darling – I don't know where your story goes next. There is no one way for you to become at peace with what you are and who you are and will take centuries at the least, or maybe – forever. Maybe you will reach a time where you try to redesign the concept of forever.

You will love passionately. You will hate in the like. You will continually arm yourself with new knowledge and new heartbreak and you will realize how strong you are and how weak and how strong your weakness makes you. There are some events that will impact you more than others, that will resonate deep within you and fill you and you will continually having new hope. And I have one suggestion, a single, simple piece of advice.

Darling? Don't let him go.

Right now, you're not thinking. The magic is starting to consume you for the first time. In a moment the magic will have filled you, will have become you; you will burst out of the water and you will turn on him and you will know for the first time just how destructive your capability for destruction is. And afterwards, you will find it even harder to breathe for a moment, but then, as I told you, you will pick yourself up easily. You will commence living again.

I tell this to you, even if you can't outright hear it, because even in the grand expanse of time you can lose track of the bigger picture. You can forget how far you've come and you'll go in life. I tell you this, with a simple message. You're only starting to find out, though that is just fine, you'll have centuries to practice, that there is an art to breathing water.

* * *

_Fin_

_(but not for him, if you know what I mean)._

* * *

Do review, please, even if it is to say you are desperately confused. Have some cake. (I do not know how this relates, but if you stuck with this till the end, I figure you deserve some, so - um, go get yourself some if you'd so please and just know that I commend it.) This does take place when he is drowning. I guess I just wanted to understand, so I created a bit of my own understanding.

Cheers!


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